dbm(3x) bug help needed BADLY

Paul A Vixie vixie at decwrl.dec.com
Thu May 11 20:01:22 AEST 1989


Jon Bennett asks a fair question: why doesn't dbm(3) work on a Symmetric?

As the former and present (sigh) owner of an s/375, I can share my own
experiences.  I noticed the corruption of the news history dbm long ago and
tracked it down to a problem in the Symmetric C compiler where bad code is
silently generated while compiling dbm.c or ndbm.c.  Symmetric insisted
that it was actually a problem in the isspace() macro or some strange
thing, but I finally showed a .c and a .s file to Bill Jolitz and he had to
agree that his compiler had done the wrong thing.  I never got a fix from
him.

Symmetric Computer Systems went out of business recently.

Moral of story: compile up a libdbm.a or libc.a(ndbm.o) with GCC.

Disclaimer: DEC owns no s/375 machines so this is obviously not DEC's opinion.
--
Paul Vixie
Work:    vixie at decwrl.dec.com    decwrl!vixie    +1 415 853 6600
Play:    paul at vixie.sf.ca.us     vixie!paul      +1 415 864 7013



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